ABSTRACT
The marxist aim of creating a human society under man's collective control involves a rejection of a static human nature, whether ‘funda-mentally’ good or bad. It conceives man shaped by and shaping the human and non-human environment in an ongoing dialectic. Clearly, then, the attempts to define a list of qualities, inevitably abstract and largely static, of some ‘new man’ are unmarxist. But they have been and continue to be a feature of much writing on both the USSR and China.
